RENDEMENT: HUGO CAPRON

Galerie Pauline Pavec is delighted to present 'Rendement', Hugo Capron's first solo exhibition in its Nord Marais space. Noted for his famous protocol developed in 2017, the principle of which consisted in emptying a pot of industrial paint onto a linen canvas whose surface area corresponded to the yield in square metres indicated on the pot's instructions for use, the artist here proposes an adaptation of this principle applied to a set of eight paintings of varying dimensions and specially designed for this exhibition.
A single 1-litre can of white paint covering 12 m2 was poured over this series of eight paintings, ranging in size from 40 cm to 2.40 m high and covering the required surface area of 12 m2. The artist's aim was to use all the paint available and apply it rigorously to the canvases, but the linen didn't do the trick, as its absorbent properties swallowed up the material and the pure white colour, instead of covering the whole, faded and was forgotten on the support. 

The series takes the form of propositional content that can only be activated through an operative gesture. Capron executes his art with purgatorial brushstrokes applied horizontally from top to bottom. The slightly acrid white strokes criss-cross the surface and compose a fragmentary writing of which each canvas is the singular repository; and on each one he redoes, recapitulates the artist's primary gesture. The exhaustion of possibilities is discovered at the end of a journey punctuated by increasingly empty canvases. One, in an eliminatory apotheosis, is strewn only with a few stodgy smudges lost on the brown, textured linen surface.
Returning to the fundamentals of painting by limiting his work to the creative triad of canvas, paint and brush, the artist simultaneously neutralises colour and reduces its vocabulary: each elementary, monochromatic brushstroke, whose density is amplified by this demand for the minimum, is necessarily applied to the canvas in a single layer with a single brush.

Capron has always questioned the limits of the artistic gesture, seeking to the extreme to exploit the possibilities of a painting, with his hands, his materials and his tools, in a derisory quest for the maximum and exhaustion, ironically recalled by the title of the series presented here: "Yield". Hugo Capron is talking about the efficient yield of the paint to be applied, but he is also talking about the productive yield of the artist-painter, with which our contemporary era has inevitably saddled the artistic gesture.
In his previous single-canvas protocols, the artist poured out the contents of the pot impulsively and quickly, and destroyed the canvas if he didn't think it was satisfactory. For this exhibition, the scale and scope of the protocol have modified his working method, as the number of canvases increases the scope for error and the opportunity to fail. The stumbling block of this new adaptive clause was the eight surfaces to be filled, which meant that the artist had to move from one format to another in a gradual and considered way, because if one of them had displeased him or not fitted in with the whole, he would have been obliged to destroy them all in order to maintain the requirement of the clause.

While tracing their furrows through the textured surfaces of the linen canvases, the sowing of paint, in a dialectic of singularity and cohesion, generates a reading that oscillates between the full and the empty, between the positive and the negative. Hugo Capron's brushstrokes fracture and dissolve the cohesion of the flatness of the painting, blurring the perceptual demarcation between background and form, especially as his canvases are no longer encircled by a border of paint as were his earlier works, but are produced in such a way that the brushstroke extends continuously beyond the edges of the painting. By seeking to make the pigment penetrate the canvas without recourse to any constructive or structuring principle, Hugo Capron composes by subtraction because, as he points out, "lack creates composition, it creates the painting through emptiness[1]". In this unstable dialectic, the artist sees the picture plane as an unstructured free field open to otherness, arbitrariness and the randomness of the brushstroke.

The splashes of paint across the canvas sketch out a landscape, evoking the luminous surface of a body of water, the wind rustling through the foliage or the muffled traces of evanescent snow, inviting the viewer to participate tactilely and performatively. The vibrant, neo-Impressionist brushstrokes and the sensation of light diffraction created by the white/brown contrast give the impression of an indexical pictorial conception in which reflections, shimmers, shadows and vibrations seem to come from our visual environment. Capron thus delivers an original articulation: the logical and systematic application of protocol results in the revelation of an informal, gestural and abstract landscape.
A master of ambiguity, Hugo Capron plays with classificatory categories. The artist summons up two ways of thinking about painting, happily confusing and confronting the two antagonistic images we generally have of the painter: that of the construction worker who covers a given surface with industrial paint in the interests of productivity, and that of the artist who, on a canvas designed for the purpose, invents a virtuoso world, brush and palette in hand.
This new collection at Galerie Pauline Pavec deploys an abstract rhetoric of undeniable formal and semantic richness, in which the stratified canvases that stand side by side establish astonishing relational properties that are bound to encourage the viewer to detect here and there the intelligent variations and their poetic evocations.

— Roxane Ilias, 2019